We live in the age of big data, but most of that data is “sparse.” Imagine, for instance, a massive table that mapped all of Amazon’s customers against all of its products, with a “1” for each product a given customer bought and a “0” otherwise. The table would be mostly zeroes.
With sparse data, analytic algorithms end up doing a lot of addition and multiplication by zero, which is wasted computation. Programmers get around this by writing custom code to avoid zero entries, but that code is complex, and it generally applies only to a narrow range of problems.
At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), researchers from MIT, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and Adobe Research recently presented a new system that automatically produces code optimized for sparse data.
That code offers a 100-fold speedup over existing, non-optimized software...
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